1. Principle: There are no coincidences. Everything has a cause and an effect. Regardless of whether what we experience is painful or creates happiness, it is always FOR the expansion of our consciousness and therefore serves us.

Victim Perspective: I am a victim at the mercy of an unfair world. Life is chaotic and without rhyme or reason.

Question: What might be the purpose of my own current life situation? Is there a thought behind my reaction? What is it?

2.Principle: We are energy-in-motion, Source-based, and vibrational beings gnerating an emotional tone of light and dense vibration depending on the nature of our own thoughts and beliefs. The high or low (emotion-based) vibration of the thoughts we think and believe attracts to us people and life encounters that reflect the same emotional tone, re a similar, dense, or light, vibrational frequency.

Victim Perspective: Bad things happen for no reason, other than because the world is a dangerous place. It is not safe to trust.

Question: What emotional tone or vibrational frequency am I currently operating on? Are my thoughts generating a light, positive, pleasant, vibrational frequency, or a heavy, dense, not so pleasant emotional tone? How are my thoughts affecting my frequency right now?

3.Principle: The Mind is made up of an opposing pair of opposites: The Victim ego, and The Observer Self. The Observer Self (Higher Mind) is the Eternal Being and Essential Nature of who we are as Divine and limitless beings that goes beyond the physical, beyond anything we can experience with the five senses. This Expansive Self is that part of us that sees and knows us without judgment, guides with compassion, and prompts us though our intuition or “Inner Knowing.” The Observer Self always operates from Love, Wisdom, and Understanding.

Its opposite is the fear-based Victim ego, often referred to as the ego, or the Lower Self. It is referred to as the lower self because is is designed to operate on the worldly level, and cannot see beyond our physical experience. These two selves are polarized opposites, the “yin-yang” of the mind, (consisting of the Light/ Dark, Conscious/Unconscious, Masculine/Feminine elements, which every manifestation must contain to be made manifest.) These two opposites are like flip sides of the same coin and inseparable, however, because they are polar opposites, their is constant friction and resistance between them. This friction between opposites creates the necessary resistance that makes expansion and increased growth of consciousness possible. But it also means we are in a perpetual state of struggle between these two extreme opposites. Peace increases as we mature in our ability to accept that both are essential, necessary parts of the wholeness of our being.

Victim Perspective: There is good and bad, right and wrong, in the world. I must fight, defeat and get rid of the bad, and experience only what I am taught is the good or the right side of thngs.

Question: What dualities am I presently aware of around me? How am I resisting the dual nature of my own Reality?

4. Principle: Energy travels in spirals and circles; and everything in life has a cyclic nature. We spiral forward on the consciousness journey, often moving through particular life themes and old cyclic patterns that serve to awaken and spiritually refine us.

Victim Perspective: I am on a straight and narrow path that must be always going forward, else I am failing or doing it wrong. I must be perfect to progress.

Question: What life themes or old patterns am I cycling through right now?

5. Principle: The world is a mirror that accurately reflects the present state of our relationship with ourselves, Source, and those around us.

Victim Perspective: Being treated unfairly. I am a victim of abuse, unfairness, and neglect at the hands of others. My only chance of feeling better is to change or stop them from abusing me.

Question: What are my present relationships and life situations reflecting to me about my thoughts and feelings towards myself?

6. Principle: When we believe what we think, we automatically feel and act as if its true, and then we react in ways that prove us right. This is the Reality Formula that defines Reality as we each personally experience it: Thoughts/Beliefs + Emotion + Reactions = Reality. There are no exceptions.

Victim Perspective: It is the world and what others do or don’t do to me that makes me feel bad. It’s their fault that I react the way I do, and they are the ones who make me suffer.

Question: What unhappy thought am I believing, and what do I create in my life by believing it?

7.Principle: What we focus on expands, and what we ignore, fades. We can collaborate with Source by choosing a possibility we want to manifest, and then set a conscious intention to ‘attend it’ into Reality.

Victim Perspective: I must force them to see how they are mistreating me, and make them apologize so they will stop hurting me and I can feel better.

Question: What am I “growing” in life? What in my life needs more attention? What needs less?

8. Principle: We choose what to believe. We co-create our life by either blindly believing, or consciously choosing, the thoughts we will believe. We question our thoughts and beliefs, and consciously choose to invest energy only in thoughts that create harmony and peace, where drama and chaos-provoking beliefs once reigned.

Victim Perspective: I have no choice but to believe what I think because that is simply the way it is … and I am at the mercy of life.

Question: What does my emotional response tell me about the thoughts I am choosing to believe right now? Am I running on unhappy thoughts, or am I choosing my thoughts consciously?

9.Principle: We project our beliefs and unhappy story on to those around us, and then react as if what we project is true, which elicits a response from the world that amply proves to us that what we believed and projected is true.

Victim Perspective: I had to react the way I did because they made me.

Question: What am I judging as unacceptable about the person, or situation I am resisting? How do I do the same things I criticize them for – to myself, if not to them, or others?

10.Principle: Through conscious intention, we align daily with Reality and surrender to enjoying a life of peace and spiritual adventure, as vessels or conduits for the Flow of Source through us. We live in Observer Consciousness, in alignment with ourselves, the world around us, and Source.

Victim Perspective: I am only a physical body, with a brain that helps me survive against the odds of making it in a cruel world where life has no meaning. Only what I can see, touch, and hear are real – everything else is made up to make us feel better about life on Earth.

Question: What ways am I currently practicing daily to align with Reality and peace?

(*When I sat down to blog this morning, I had something totally different in mind to write, but this post on realizing our life challenges as opportunity for Awakening is what came through and insisted on being written … I do not know how much YOU get from what is written through this hand, but I sit at the feet of the Source of my Supply.)

Transforming Struggle to Opportunities For Awakening :

I often wonder, in my helpless baby moments when I am on the victim triangle, why my life is so full of challenges. I moan and groan about it as I was doing recently when my Higher Wisdom piped up and provided me with a bit more insight into why life is marked with difficult moments. I was shown that we ALL must go through necessary challenges at each phase of life. They are the life hurdles that are designed to strengthen and grow us.

I saw that we don’t get to “arrive” somewhere and stay. Growth means we must go on to the next level of challenges; it means that there is always a reason for the particular challenges we face. Our challenges are specific to us, designed to prepare us for the life lessons yet to come. Rather than being thrown at us to trip us up, these difficult passages are actually FOR us!

Our life challenges do not come to us because we are failures, or because we did something wrong that we are being punished for, or because we are unloved, or because we have been rejected by a Universe who deems us unworthy. NEVER does the Universe act out of such motives! We are beloved and well “parented” by a Universal Intelligence that seeks to foster our ultimate highest and best good through the discipline gained from the very life challenges we so resist! Perhaps we have forgotten that we signed up for Earth Boot Camp when we said “Yes” to this earth tour of duty. Our difficulties are rites of passage, by design.

Life challenges are built into life; this is how we know they are an essential part of life. No one gets off easy. Everyone has their own load of life-expanding challenges that must be lived through, whether we grow from them or not. How we deal with these life challenges is our personal choice.

Just by virtue of having a physical body that ages and eventually fails to function, it guarantees that we will face challenges. Every age has its own set of challenges built in. If challenges are built into our life existence from birth then how can we deny the predestined need for challenge as a part of the path that every human must walk? How can that which is designed to guide us as disciples be about punishment for some arbitrary doing or lack thereof?

No! Our life challenges are what shape and shift our seeing to align us better with that which we came here to achieve and become. They are part of our on-the-ground training.

By studying carefully the lessons offered to us through the life challenges we have already faced and overcome, we can often find the ways they have strengthened us and even set us up in preparation for the things we achieve. Life challenges refine us through the questions they require answers to, and through the storms, they bring us face to face with life. Hardship and challenges often serve as grist for the mill towards becoming our best and most mature selves. They coax us towards grace, gratitude, and acceptance.

Or challenges can drive us to collapse into puddles of ineffective misery, all depending upon how we meet them. And that is our choice. We can choose to either meet challenges and hardship with resilience and thus overcome, OR we can choose to meet them with resistance and collapse.

The Universe is NOT mean; it IS relentless. It has its job to do, which is to induce growth, to move us from the state of consciousness that has us lost in immaturity. We are like babies ranting and raving about how unfair life is and how it should be easier. We feel entitled and constantly demand more. Only through life challenges are we brought into the gratitude that goes with FINAL resolution. Only on the other side of the challenge, do we find ourselves thankful for what we have, even if it is NOT what we thought it “should” be. This is how we become “grown-ups” (Becoming a grown-up is the real purpose of our spiritual journey.) Coming out the other side with grace and acceptance of what is is the stuff of maturity. As mature souls, our battle-scars from the life “problems” we have encountered tell a story of wisdom gained from life lessons well-learned and now ready to share with others who follow.

At every stage of life, we are met with new and different challenges; often these are age-specific. For instance, every child faces the challenge of learning to walk at one stage of life, and then at a later stage they take on the challenge of learning how to ride a bicycle – later driving a car becomes their age-specific challenge. As I said, we are all guaranteed such age-related challenges, so that even if we somehow escape bigger life challenges, we will have those that go naturally with being in a physical body. These age-related challenges, once met and surpassed, become part of the foundation needed as a firm footing for the next challenge – all aimed to evolve us into full-fledged grown-ups.

But most of us are also given a fair supply of more personal, individually tailored challenges. These personally “crafted” (by Universal Mind and our own Inner Nature) challenges are not accidental happenings; they are not a mistake. Spiritual Law reminds us that there are no mistakes, that even those seemingly aberrant happenings are actually “plotted” (by Higher Mind) into the journey we are here to take, as preparatory lessons, for where it is we have come to go.

For example, I think of my close friend who was born with unformed, non-functional thumbs. The challenges he has faced at every juncture have been difficult, but necessary on his way to becoming the amazing artist and brilliant man that he is. His hands have played an essential role in almost everything he excels in today. His hands have been his teacher, his task-master, as well as the bane of his existence. They have been an extreme source of embarrassment and visible proof to him of a belief he has carried since early childhood about himself as being imperfect, and therefore less valuable than others. The hurdles his hands have required him to overcome have been life lessons that have brought him into his spiritual nature. They have taught him humility and acceptance towards the infirmities of others. Not only that but his hands have motivated him to strive to achieve things considered beyond the scope of possibility not just for himself, but for anybody. He, through the process of overcoming the inherent challenges his hands have demanded, can perform manual tasks with ease and finesse that even “normal” hands cannot do. His life challenge has turned him into an absolute miracle of expression.

Each of us has our own particular “schedule” of challenges we are given, again not because of our lack of luck or worth, but because we are loved and therefore provided with the life lessons that will bring us closer to the Source of our being. These challenges that we consider “unfair” and unfortunate, are the very life lessons we need to stretch and expand us to acquire the abilities and strengths required to achieve the purpose for which we came.

Part of our personal work is to learn to see our life challenges as that which we face for a reason; they are designed to help us realize them as stepping stones to a Higher Self Expression. The Guiding Principles teach us how to befriend our life struggles and meet our life challenges with grace, dignity, and a peaceful understanding of the necessity for the challenging life we may be given. They teach us to turn them into instruction for a better Way of life.

Are you ready to embrace your life challenges as friend and teacher?

*If you do indeed find value through such “Sharings” then join with Jaquetta and Me on Reality Formula Live where we explore the Work that has been handed me over the years. We need your support in building our online community.

(After I wrote this, I was moved to reach for the Bible and open it randomly. I opened to Hebrews 12:5:

“My son (daughter), do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son (daughter).” )

We all have our ways of “not going there” – of trying to avoid feeling the inner pain brought on by our losses and difficult transitions. And – please don’t get me wrong! I understand! Believe me!

I have had my own ways of medicating and numbing to the pain in my efforts to keep from falling into the vat of inner darkness left over from things unresolved and un-faced within the psyche. I know what it is to push myself over the rim and into the vat of pain as if I am some kind of glutton for it, and then try to scramble my way out of the soup I’ve dropped myself into.

I’ve recently done just that – in saying good-bye to a relationship I did not want to let go of … This morning as I sat with the loss, I asked myself, WHO in me it is that insists on pushing me into the “hot soup” of life experience? Why can’t I let myself accept the offer of a cozy nest of numb comfort, where I might be “wrapped in swaddling” and “protected” from the storms of Life? Why can’t I settle for that?

The answer that presented itself in response to that question is summed up beautifully in The Book Of Rune Cards, in the description of the Rune card, Hagalaz “Disruption” which I drew for clarity sake; “… The answer to “why this?” is this “pressing need within the psyche to break free from constricting identification with material reality and to experience the world of archetypal mind.”

Yep, that’s me! It’s been my story all of my life. Some of us are not here to attain “worldly success,” but are moved by other purposes – for self-realization, driven by the need to experience all the nooks and crannies of the inner darkness – for the purpose of Awakening.

Here are the words that I was given this morning in my daily practice to explain this time of “sitting in the soup” here, in this monastic cell of an RV that is my temporary retreat, where life has been brought down to a simple size and where there is room only for me and the Immensity of an all inspiring Source that has much to say to me – and to share with you, perhaps too!

The Inner Voice said:

“Don’t try to avoid or shut down the pain! Allow the full onslaught of the waves of internal angst – Meet the marauding invasive thoughts of fear and shame. Look for the gleanings of Awakening amidst the shatter. Gather these, like diamonds-in-the-rough and string them like pearls … and then wear them like a necklace, like a crown of Consciousness.

Explore each gleaning, every pearl of wisdom found in the fire – polish it and offer it as a gift of insight to those who want to know – who want to understand what it is to sit by the fires of hell and slowly burn … burning away the layers of unreality, the illusion and dross of denial … to burn until there is nothing left … of you … except an empty vessel, a holey cloth, shot full of holes – barely able to hold together, allowing the Light of Awareness, of New Dawning to pour through … and light up the World.”

There are times when we may feel emotionally or verbally attacked by a friend or family member “out of nowhere.” Or perhaps you’ve watched yourself act out in a painful, destructive way.

Why do we suddenly strike out in such ways? To put it simply, it’s because the unhappy story, which we assume is true, gets triggered. And when it does, we go into defense mode, which generally starts with blaming someone else for our pain and suffering.

For instance, we may believe that we are unlovable, therefore no one can be trusted, or that the world is dangerous and everybody is out to hurt us or take something away from us; those sort of beliefs bring on feelings of distrust, resentment, and paranoia and then we automatically act in ways that willprove our unhappy story to be true. So this means that if we go in to knee jerk reaction when our friend or loved one is triggered and jumps down our throat, and we react defensively, we actually only help them prove their own unhappy story to be true, which then gives them justification (at least in their mind) to retaliate. The war is on!

Bottom line is that once we understand this, it allows us a conscious choice: A) We can go into full blown react, see ourselves as being at the mercy of their outrageous behavior (victim) and jump on the Victim Triangle with them, or B) We can choose to see them as our present opportunity for refinement. 😊

The challenge is to learn to be kind to both ourselves AND them.

Seek to see the story behind the reaction and use that understanding to better respond (rather than to react) from a place of self-responsibility and kindness – towards the other as well as towards yourself.

Remember it’s not a question of whether or not to tolerate abuse at the hands of another – of course we don’t set ourselves up to be someone’s whipping post, however, rather than trying to control or change the other persons behavior (good luck with that! ;)) we learn to focus instead on refining our own consciousness by learning to practice becoming the best and highest example of Reality and peace possible.

This may sound like a tall order – but really is it any harder than the misery and prolonged suffering we create for one another when we react blindly our of our unhappy stories instead?

We have forgotten the art of impeccability as a spiritual tool and we suffer mightily from it.

Without the practice of impeccability we never realize what it is to reach our full potential – the code for which we carry in our cellular DNA – we never know the full extent of the unique and creative selves we came to express.

Instead we settle for mediocre lives. We get by. We do what we have to do. And we wonder why we are so dissatisfied or disappointed with life.

Why not make this moment an act of impeccability? Whatever you are doing, give it your full attention. Set the intention to complete the task with precision and excellence, whether it’s chopping vegetables or cleaning the tub… Whether it’s speaking to a friend or caring for a relative. Go beyond what is expected – not to impress them (though it will! 😉) but FOR your own spiritual development!

Make it your habit to rise to your best no matter how great or small the task that is placed before you. Even if the task is an unpleasant one! Especially then!

Allow the practice of impeccability to be a tool for your refinement, shaping you, through its practice, into being the full realization of your own Highest and Best Self.